State Farm Florida: mold in the house, and no coverage for anywhere else to live

This denial reaches past the building and into where the family sleeps. Additional living expense, the coverage that pays for somewhere else to stay while a home is uninhabitable, is refused here because the thing making the home uninhabitable is mold.

The list preceding that conclusion is worth reading for what it sweeps in. Ordinance or law, mold or fungus, failure to act by any entity, defective design or materials, maintenance, weather conditions. Weather conditions doing duty as an exclusion in a Florida homeowners claim is a striking inclusion, since weather is the thing the policy exists to insure against, and it usually appears in a narrower clause about deterioration caused by weather over time rather than damage caused by a storm.

Mold coverage in Florida is normally capped by endorsement rather than excluded outright, and the cap and its trigger are the first things to check against a letter like this. The second is whether the mold followed a covered water loss, because a covered cause with a mold consequence is a different question from mold arising on its own.